Hi everybody, I'm posting this one in two parts, because there was just that much bawful last night. I also want to give people a chance to read a WoTN entry before tonight's games start, while I continue to go about my writing process, which is mostly Tibetan stone throwing method while chainsmoking.

I'm gonna kick off this post the same way I ended the last one, because there is an important issue I've decided to obnoxiously soapbox that I don't want getting buried. Sorry for the redundancy. If you've already read the following two paragraphs, skip to the Worst of the Night.

Corporate Fat Cats: Thank you anonymous commenter, whoever you
are, for letting me know that in Houston, you have to have Comcast to
watch the Rockets. Apparently, if you have
DirecTV or AT&T U-verse, you can't watch games for free on TV.
AT&T claims at least 300,000 subscribers in Houston for U-verse.
When you add that to the amount of people a company with 20 million
nation wide subscribers probably has in the nation's 3rd largest city, I
wouldn't be surprised if there are a million people in Houston unable
to enjoy Harden's beard.

So, that's Houston and Los
Angeles. I wonder just how big this problem gets. Please, if you are
experiencing this injustice in your own city, try to share your
situation in the comments. I want to be able to show the true scope of
this assault on human dignity. Thank you.

Worst of the Night

Lin trying to replace his lost body salts with delicious blood

Jeremy Lin's blood lust: Has anybody else noticed that this guy can't get enough of his own blood? Knick fans have seen plenty of this, as you can see below.

Just let it pour into my mouth

Don't worry, Jeremy, there's plenty of blood where that came from. The human body is known to contain in excess of five and a half liters of blood, or, for Americans who don't take a lot of science courses, one and a half gallons.

Crotchety senior-citizen Andre Miller delivered the blow that "accidentally" bloodied Lin-firmary. This might've had something to do with Miller's turnovers, 5, and Lin's career high in steals, 6. Oops. Sorry, that was clearly just a coincidence because it was an "accident".

James Harden: James Harden probably doesn't actually deserve to be here, considering that he also established a career high in steals, 5, while managing to avoid the elder Miller's clubbing blows. That said, scoring 15 points on 5 for 15 shooting probably hasn't been a good thing since I Love Lucy was making its debut. Part of the burden of being the franchise star is taking the blame for losses like this. Unless your Kobe, then you can usually just find a way to blame it on Pau.

You see this too is actually all Pau's fault...

OKC negotiating methods: Maybe Harden has just moved from anger and bargaining to depression in his grief process.Apparently, Harden was only given an hour to think over OKC's final offer. Adrian Wojnarowski reported on Tuesday that Harden is unsurprisingly still working through his feelings about what happened.

"After everything we established – everything we had done – you give me
an hour?" Harden told Yahoo! Sports on Monday afternoon. "This was one
of the biggest decisions of my life. I wanted to go home and pray about
it. It hurt me. It hurt."

It's hard not to sympathize. Harden also painfully added:

"Who knows? Another day, who knows what another day would've done?"

I know I don't. Now where'd I put that Vodka.
In a final note for this segment, it was probably unnecessarily heavy handed for the Thunder management to have forced Harden to make the decision alone in a room with no windows, where they had triggered a bomb to explode after exactly one hour of decision making. I mean, I know you got to work with other teams' trade deadlines and everything, but there's a fine line that got crossed somewhere along the way.

The Poor-land-o Magic: Facing the stifling defense of the T-pups, only three Magic players were able to score as many points as they had field goal attempts. I can't overstate how bawful an accomplishment that is, and it goes a long way towards explaining why they scored 75 points as a team on just 28 field goals.

Just look what they're doing to poor Mickey

Although Maurice "yeah baby, I'm a real NBA player" Harkless was listed as the team's top performer with 7 points, it seems pretty clear that J.J. Reddick had the team's only half-way decent night with 16 points, and even he missed most of his shots and had 5 turnovers. You just don't win that way.

At the moment, Orlando's starting 5 is E'Twaun Moore, Arron Afflalo, Nicola Vucevic, Josh McRoberts, and Big Baby. No offense to unproven talent and Arron Afflalo, but that's gotta be the worst starting 5 of the night. At least until...

The New Orleans we miss Anthony Davis's: Hold the phone--franchise low alert! Maybe you're thinking it's not too surprising that the New Orleans Hornets scored a franchise low, 62 points, seeing that they're a relatively new team, and you know there's no way in hell that a team's gonna score 62 points with Chris Paul around, even if he's injured on the bench. However, this franchise low also includes the Charlotte Hornets, making this a potential front-runner for the bawfullest night in the history of the twenty-four year old franchise.

How did they do it? Well, they showed Orlando a thing or two about sucking by outdoing them debacle by debacle: The Magic needed 80 shots as a team to score 75 points, so the Hornets attempted 69 shots to score 62 points; the Magic only made 28 shots, so the Hornets stopped at 23; the Magic's top scorer had 16 points, so the Hornet's top scorer settled for 10, etc.... I could go on but I think you get the point, the Hornets really sucked. I mean, really, really, really sucked. Really.

The Philadelphia 76er: Against nearly any other NBA team, the 6ers would have almost certainly lost last night. They scored 77 points, only took 5 foul shouts (Al Farouq Aminu took 6 for the Hornets), and they went 4 for 22 from deep. It's pretty obvious why Doug Collins was pissed, according to Jrue Holiday “Coach really reamed us at halftime". No wonder they shut the Hornets down after that. I didn't know that NBA coaches were still allowed to use reamers.

This one's called "The Rhino"

This motivational technique didn't keep Philadelphia from letting two opposing players set career highs. Jason Smith blocked 5 shots in under fifteen minutes, and Al Farouq Aminu grabbed 16 rebounds. Austin Rivers also set a career high last night, for the most games he's caused Anthony Davis to miss with an errant elbow (2 and a half), but this can't be blamed on the Sixers.

That other New York team: Well, at least you can't accuse the Brooklyn Nets of setting unreasonably high expectations. I'd say they have nowhere to go but up, but the Magic and the Hornets tonight have proven that's not true. Still, losing by 30 to the Heat isn't going to make anybody excited. Except Pat Riley, and we all know he feeds on human misery (it keeps his hair greasy and in the same shape it's been in since the early 80's).

The Brooklyn Knight's not looking so hot

The Nets only made three 3's, shot under 40% while letting their opponent shoot over 50%, and couldn't even score as many points as the Magic did in their game.

Joe Johnson: The Armadillo Cowboy might need a new pair of boots. Scoring 9 points on 4 of 14 shooting, while only grabbing two rebounds and dishing one assist, isn't exactly gonna keep Brooklyn in that "best backcourt in the NBA" debate much longer. Does anybody have a guess how many games it will take for Joe to get up to shooting 40% on the season?

I'll forego my usual Bawful After Dark post tonight because of this post going up late and in two pieces. So I'll just put an abbreviated version of what I had planned to post here for posterity's sake.

Clippers at Trail Blazers, TNT, 10:30pm: The Blazers bench is, well, not good. They are averaging 12.8 points per game right now, dead last in the league. Also, this is the first time the Clippers have had to play outside of LA this season. Their lone road game to this point was against the Lakers.

Mike Brown was hired so that he could be fired early this season, triggering a Laker "surge" that will carry them to the title and at the same time creating a pretty storyline for the Kobe Years DVD. It's like a movie.